discipline-based art education: its criticisms and its critics

National Art Education Association

Discipline-Based Art Education: Its Criticisms and Its CriticsAuthor(s): Elliot W. EisnerSource: Art Education, Vol. 41, No. 6 (Nov., 1988), pp. 7-13Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193084 .

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A

Elliot W. Eisner

Discipline -Based

Art Education:

Its Criticisms and

Its Critics

t is a sign of intellectual health that a topic as important as what should be taught in art and for what ends should be

the subject of heated debate in the field of art education. If DBAE has accom- plished anything thus far, it has been to stimulate that debate. Yet, heat, as emo- tionally stimulating as it may be, needs light for it to be useful. My regret in reading the criticisms of DBAE published in the March 1988 issue of Art Education is that, with the exception of Karen Hamblen's article to which I will devote major attention, the critical comments were closer to catharsis than illumination. In those sections where they were not cathartic, they frequently suffered from lapses of logic, obscure language, and non sequitur. Let me begin with Peter London's letter to the editor.

Dr. London begins by asking "What's all the fuss about Getty and DBAE?... Have I missed some original contribu- tion that DBAE makes to our field that heretofore has gone unsaid?" His ap- parent point is, "Why the excitement, we have been doing this for years."

If London had read the DBAE litera-

ture, he wouldn't have been so sur- prised. He would have known that the ideas upon which DBAE is built have indeed been around for years, something that the Getty Center for Educa- tion in the Arts has acknowledged, over and over again. All he would have needed to do would have been to read the Summer 1987 issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education. The entire issue was devoted to DBAE, its antecendents, its rationale, and its disciplines. The problem is that these ideas, some of which are a part of the NAEA Quality Goals statement, have been too rarely implemented in our schools. How do we know? The Getty Center looked. The Getty Center surveyed school districts throughout the country in the largest study of curriculum practices ever undertaken in the field. Researchers found very few school districts in which anything close to what the field has endorsed for over 25 years was being implemented on a district-wide basis. The results of the research are published in a 427-page technical report that is available from the Getty Center for anyone who wishes to read it (McLaughlin & Thomas, 1984).

Art Education/November 1988 7

I



School children view Mexican papier mache sculpture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Photo by Vivienne della Grotta. ? Vivenne della Grotta 1979

8 Art Education/November 1988



But then London does a turn around and wonders about Lowenfeld, or Chap- man, or D'Amico and whether we would be dreaming about their ideas if they came with a hefty endowment. Dr. London wants it both ways. He implies, on the one hand, that he has been doing what DBAE advocates for years; on the other hand he endorses a Lowenfeldian view of art education practice. I wonder why he does one thing, while endorsing another.

London concludes his letter with "And another thing. Has anyone field tested DBAE against a control group and a contending theory of art education to see whether the thing works better than anything else currently on the market?" Dr. London, first, DBAE is not a thing; it's an idea, a conception of art education that can be implemented in a variety of ways. Second, it is par- ticularly ironic that London should raise the point of field testing. The Getty Center for Education in the Arts has made a greater effort to study the effects of DBAE than any other agency that has supported curriculum development and implementation in the field of art education. From the very beginning, evaluation has been an on-going part of the procedures used in the Getty Institute for Educators in the Visual Arts and in the district-wide implementation programs underway. Dr. London concludes his letter by asking "Have I just been missing a great deal?" The answer seems obvious.

The first article in the March 1988 issue of Art Education to take a negative view of DBAE is Helen Muth's. I must confess I found her article an array of disconnected asser- tions which possesses everything except an argument. Dr. Muth says that the problem that she is addressing is to identify "Just what is at stake in the whole notion of Getty, or any private organization, adopting a prescriptive position toward curriculum reform for a broad based public constituency". Her article, presumably, is intended to tell the reader just what it is that is at stake. Her answer is, "The language of DBAE reveals the narrowness of its origins". And just what are those narrow origins? "It is a language of the practitioners -

the artists, the aestheticians, the art historians, and the art critics".

That the language of artists, art historians, aestheticians, and art critics seems narrow to Dr. Muth, I find per- plexing. What language is presumably broad, Dr. Muth does not say. What she does say is that "I feel we are being forced into subjugation by DBAE". Who is forcing art teachers into subjugation? Dr. Muth does not say. She goes on to say, "We are made subjects of DBAE, for it tells us who we are and all that we can ever be." Where does it say that? Dr. Muth does not say. Dr. Muth asks why so much attention is given to building a case for four curricular divisions or categories of art learning. She asks, "Why not three or four or any other number?" Indeed, why not? There is nothing sacred about four. If someone has a better way to describe the areas in which learning in art can be fostered, they are just as free to publish them as we were free to publish our ideas well before the Getty Center was on the scene. Does Dr. Muth have a better array of such areas? She does not say. In sum, what we have here is a polemic, not an argument. Like Chicken Little, Dr. Muth believes that we are close to the apocalypse. I do not doubt that her feelings are real; but feelings are not argument, and polemic is not critique.

The second article by Norma K. Pittard represents the best example of a contradiction of form and content I have encountered in recent years. Dr. Pittard is worried about the romantic legacy in art education, that legacy that regards aesthetic experience as special and works of art as unique. It is a legacy that regards it as important to attend to visual art not primarily as an instrument for use, but as an object for contemplation, something that has the capacity to evoke certain experiences that we find satisfying, moving, il- luminating. Such an orientation to art, she tells us, is, "The same romanticist aesthetic doctrine that has plagued art education for the last 60 years". What she claims is that the work of art should never be viewed outside of the cultural context in which it was created and that DBAE, as represented

in my writings, decontextualizes works of art. How she arrives at that con- clusion from what I have written about DBAE is difficult to understand. In my essay, The Role of Discipline- Based Art Education in America's Schools, which she cites in her article, I say:

History and culture constitute a third important area for learning in discipline-based art education. Here we are interested in helping children understand that art does not emerge in the proverbial vacuum. All art is part of a culture. All cultures give direction to art, sometimes by rejecting what artists have made and at other times by rewarding them for it. To understand culture, one needs to understand its manifestations in art, and to understand art, one needs to understand how culture is expressed through its content andform.

The austerity of a Shaker chair or table is reflection of the religious convictions of the Shakers and how they thought life should be lived. The aggressive force and movement of futurist artists in early 20th-century Italy reflect powerful ideological beliefs about what Italian society should become. The pristine and lean qualities of the steel and glass sky- scraper embody a view of the optimal relationship of man and machine. Such art forms in each period, each location, each culture mutually influence each other. Just as culture shapes art, art shapes culture. Our convictions, our technology, and our imagination shape our images, and our images, in turn, shape our perception of the world. One major aim of discipline-based art education is to help students understand these ;elationships by examining the interaction between art and culture over time (Eisner, 1987, p. 20).

But I want to go even further here. As useful as contextualization is, it is not true that one must always context- ualize a work of art within its culture in order to experience what it has to provide. One need not know the culture of the Zapotecs to be moved by




Santa Barbara Museum of Art docent discusses art with school children. Photo by Vivienne della Grotta. ? Vivienne della Grotta 1987

their clay figures, or the customs of Ife to appreciate the sensitivity of their masks. One need not be familiar with the Han civilization in order to enjoy the texture, proportion, patina, and re- strained eloquence of their bronze vessels. One need not know anything about 18th Century Germany to enjoy the music of Mozart, or Bach. Works of art can be enjoyed, experienced, and prized on their own terms.

Having said this, I do not want to suggest that understanding the cultural context within which works of arts are created may not be useful. It can be very useful. Anything that can be brought to bear upon a work of art can be useful for increasing its meaningfulness. However, extra aesthetic concepts and considerations

do not guarantee aesthetic experience. An anthropologist might be able to write volumes about 19th Century Haida culture and, at the same time, have little or no appreciation of the aesthetic features of their wooden rattles. Apparently Dr. Pittard has a long standing pique with formalist aesthetics and believes that she has found a whipping-boy in DBAE.

Dr. Pittard goes on to say that art has rules. She asserts it is the romantic legacy that believes it has no rules. Further, she claims that if there are no rules or right or wrong answers, there are no problems. She quotes me as follows: "There is no single right or wrong way to solve a problem or formulate an answer in the arts". She conveniently forgets about the

qualifier "single" and says "However, if there are no right or wrong answers, one must question if a problem exists". In addition to the convenient though intellectually questionable reconstruction of what I said, she goes on to say "Further, if there are no rules to 'prove' or disprove the correctness of an answer, there would be little need for judgment". Notice that the word prove gets quotes around it, while the word disprove does not. Is "prove" being used metaphorically and disprove literally? Dr. Pittard does not say. I find these tactics both trans- parent and intellectually troublesome. When the argument is weak, alter what someone has said to make it vul- nerable to attack, and then use elusive language so that one can have it both




ways. The affective romanticism Dr. Pittard condemns pervades her own argument. Dr. Pittard substitutes pas- sion for analysis, and tinkering with text a way to make a point.

What is an intellectually serious effort to critique DBAE is the article by Karen Hamblen. Hamblen makes the following 10 points.

1. Any curriculum teaches more than its content; it teaches by virtue of its form. Form teaches values and attitudes and ways in which to think.

2. In a DBAE curriculum the emphasis is on learning art content, not on students' artistic development or the originality of their art products.

3. Little is actually known about what DBAE teaches, at least in terms of hard data.

4. Because DBAE is similar inform to conventional curriculum, it is "open to charges of simplification, stand- ardization, irrelevance, elitism and so on".

5. If the curriculum is created by someone other than the teacher, the students will be required to adjust to the curriculum. In doing so they "learn to subordinate their idio- syncratic responses to art and the artistic preferences of the subcultural group to conformity to what the curriculum requires."

6. DBAE emphasizes Western art. 7. Multiple approaches are

sacrificedfor the sake of efficiency and accountability.

8. DBAE is severely limited in scope since it does not also include psychology, philosophy, history, Western science - indeed the full range of human knowledge.

9. Western art is treated as value neutral, that is, as nonproblematic and therefore open to uncriticized acceptance of the values it reflects.

10. There is increasing recognition by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts that DBAE will need to be interpreted individually by teachers and school districts.

These points are both reflective and worthy of serious attention. I intend to give them that attention here. I con-

sider them one at a time. 1. I agree with Hamblen that any

curriculum teaches through both its form and its content. It teaches implicitly as well as explicitly, and it teaches, most of all perhaps, by what it neglects teaching. I have called these sources of school learning the result of the explicit, the implicit and the null curriculum, (Eisner, 1985, Chap. 5). What is conflated in Hamblen's response is DBAE as a conception and the curricula that have been used to try to teach what DBAE regards as important. This conflation is unfortunate since DBAE is not a curriculum but an approach to art education that (1) argues the importance of learning in four content areas, (2) values programs that have a sequential character, (3) embraces the idea that art programs should be goal oriented, (4) holds that goal oriented programs ought to be evaluated, and (5) believes that school districts as a whole should adopt a common approach to the achievement of these goals.

How the curriculum is to be designed, what particular goals should be formulated, what exemplars should be used to represent art, how the curriculum should be taught, how much time should be devoted to the teaching of art, how the four areas of learning in art are to be related are open-ended issues.

DBAE does not prescribe answers to these questions, nor does it prescribe a particular curriculum. Indeed, at present there is not one commercially produced curriculum that has been intentionally designed as a DBAE curriculum. Hamblen is correct in her statement about the ways in which curricula teach. She is wrong in assuming that DBAE is a curriculum. It is not.

That the Getty Center is interested in fostering a wide variety of forms to DBAE curricula is reflected in the title of the national conference held in Los Angeles in February of 1987: "DBAE: What Forms Will It Take?". Please note that this title is a question, not an answer. It is also reflected in the Getty Center's two newest efforts, the Cur- ricular Development Institutes which

will provide art teachers with both the time and place to plan new curriculum prototypes that can be used in their schools and shared with others, and the Regional Institutes for Staff De- velopment and Curricular Imple- mentation. These programs are hardly prescriptive.

2. Hamblen's assertion that DBAE is interested in teaching content, not in fostering artistic development or originality, reflects an unfortunate dichotomy between what people learn and how they develop. That dichotomy contradicts what Hamblen correctly pointed out earlier; to wit: form and content count precisely because they do influence how people develop.

Regarding the development of the student's originality - or to use an older word "creativity" - it is unfortunate for the Getty Center that some of the curriculum materials used in schools to exemplify DBAE pay so little attention to the development of originality. But this is a function of particular curricula, not a reflection of the values of DBAE. To move from the limitations of particular curricula to conclusions about the nature of DBAE is to over generalize.

3. Dr. Hamblen claims that little is known about what DBAE teaches. From an absolute perspective this is true. There are few assessment instruments or procedures available to assess learning in the areas that DBAE addresses. Yet from a relative perspective more has been done to assess the effects of DBAE curricula than to assess the effects of what is typically taught in art in most classrooms. I need not remind readers of the paucity of assessment devices in Tests In Print (Mitchell, 1983), the most comprehensive catalog of tests available. It lists only seven tests in art, and of these seven, most are over 25 years of age. This comment, inci- dentally, is not an argument for evaluation by testing; it is simply a datum that describes an important feature of our field. Thus while Hamblen is correct that little is known about the effects of DBAE, more is known about the effects of DBAE in those schools in which it has been used than




is known about the effects of non- DBAE programs. The little that is known about the measured effects of non-DBAE programs is known through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Wilson, 1981). That assessment provided a rather dis- tressing picture of what students had learned in art.

4. Dr. Hamblen claims that because DBAE is similar in form to conventional academic curricula, it is open to charges of simplification, standardiza- tion, and irrelevance. I think that Hamblen's point here is well taken. Too much of schooling is boring and without much meaning to students. What we need to avoid is a replication of the worst features of academic life. Writing in The Role of Discipline- Based Art Education in America's Schools I said:

To say that discipline-based art education requires the presence of at least one written curriculum should not be interpreted to mean that the teaching of the visual arts should become an educationally lifeless academic pursuit that imitates the worst features of the academic curriculum. An area of study that prizes sensibility and imagination, that encourages risk-taking and intellectual play cannot achieve its most cherished aims by becoming rote or mechanical. Such qualities are of doubtful utility even in academic subjects; they have no place in discipline-based art education. What we seek is both seriousness and joy, exploration and rigor, effort and pleasure. To say Ihat serious work in the arts is demanding and hard is not to imply that the work should be joyless. Curriculum materials should provide teachers with a challenging array of sequentially organized, goal- directed activities that capture students' interest and help them learn substantive content. Without such curricula, the aims of discipline-based art education are unlikely to be realized (Eisner, 1987, p. 29).

Student in workshop for children, Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Photo by Vivienne della Grotta. ? Vivienne della Grotta 1986

"DBAE makes no apology for recommending careful planning. Such planning does not require that the student's values be disregarded, although it is likely that in some way they will be changed."

I believe that our task is not to scrap DBAE, but to develop methods


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and approaches that foster the comprehensive, complex, and subtle forms of learning that DBAE embraces. In this respect we have a long way to go.

5. As far as curricula being separate from students, of course this is true for the intended curriculum. The intended curriculum cannot be well planned on the spot or by the seat of one's pants. Curriculum making is important. Decisions about content inclusion and content exclusion are among the most important decisions we make in schools. To do our students justice we ought to be reflective about what we are going to teach. But because we plan curricula does not mean we cannot take our students into account or that it must be taught mindlessly.

The operational curriculum is what we actually teach in classrooms. The intended curriculum is what we think we will teach. No skilled teacher im- plements intentions without adaptation - even neglect when necessary. DBAE makes no apology for recommending careful planning. Such planning does not require that the student's values be disregarded, although it is likely that in some way they will be changed. Any educational enterprise is in some way aimed at changing values and expanding perspectives.

6. Hamblen's claim that DBAE emphasizes Western art is true. Given our culture, why not? What would be unfortunate is if it paid exclusive attention to Western art. It does not.

7. The idea that multiple approaches to art teaching are sacrificed for the sake of efficiency and accountability is, I think, partly true. DBAE places no value on efficiency. It does value accountability. One of the tough problems that art educators face is how to assess what students learn without undermining what we cherish most about art. A second problem is se- curing public support for art education. Such support, in my opinion, is more likely if the district can embrace a common view of art education. DBAE represents one view. It can be operationalized in principle through multiple means, but it does constrain curricular options. This means that if a

district decides to endorse DBAE, some approaches will be rejected. One of the lessons of life is that it is filled with trade-offs. If the trade-off is not worth the trade, do not make it.

8. What is silly in Hamblen's critique is her approving quotation from Jerome Hausman that DBAE is limited in scope. Why? Because it does not include "psychology, philosophy, history, literature, science- indeed the full range of human knowledge". Come now! Is the art teacher to be responsible for everything? DBAE is currently being criticized by some for including too much. Now this - psychology, philosophy, history, literature, science - indeed the full range of human knowledge! Just how much should we expect an art teacher to teach?

9. Hamblen comments perceptively that DBAE curricula does not foster critical attitudes on the students' part about the values tacit in the materials they study. I think she is correct. American schools need to do this. No curriculum I know in any field does this job now. It's something that I hope curriculum developers will pay attention to.

10. Dr. Hamblen indicates that she believes the Getty Center is becoming aware of the fact that DBAE curricula need to be interpreted individually. Since its inception, The Center has been aware of this fact. What happens to perceptions in the field is not un- common among those who work in complex organizations: Attributes are assigned to policies and policy-makers that neither the policies nor the policy- makers reflect. Teachers sometimes say I can't do it because the principal won't let me. The principal says I can't provide permission because the superintendent won't like it. The superintendent says permission can't be granted because the state says no. If you ask the people there, they say the superintendent is in charge. The superintendent says he never said no to the principal, and the principal says that the teachers can do what they want in their classrooms. This is a classic example of attribution theory in action. We assign to others

attributes, whether or not they possess them.

The Getty Center expects, indeed hopes, that individual teachers and schools will make appropriate adapta- tions of DBAE curricula. No one knows the child better than the teacher. To say that the Getty Center wants a canned, teacher-proof program to be implemented in the name of DBAE is a charge made by those who either do not read what has been written, do not understand what they read, or have other axes to grind.

DBAE is a concept, an approach to art education. It may not be right for everyone. Those who are guided by other lights ought to follow them. The Getty Center has helped make it possible to develop and implement ideas that even those who criticize DBAE acknowledge have been in the field for a very long time. Now that these ideas have an opportunity to be implemented, some of DBAE's critics worry and claim that the sky is falling. Rather than hand wringing and prophesying gloom and doom, art education would be better served if the energy devoted to the criticism of DBAE was directed toward making a better mousetrap. If the critics can do that, I will be among the first to join the world at their doorstep. D

Elliot W. Eisner is a Fellow at the Centerfor Advanced Study in the Be- havioral Sciences and a Professor of Education and Art at Stanford Univ- ersity.

References Eisner, E. (1985). The educational

imagination (2nd ed.). New York: Macmillan. Eisner, E. (1987). The role of discipline-

based art education in America's schools. California: The Getty Center for Education in the Arts.

McLaughlin, M., and Thomas, M. A. (1984). Art history, art criticism, and art production: An examination of art education in selected school districts (Vols. 1-3). Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.

Mitchell, J. V. (Ed.). (1983). Tests in print III. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Wilson, B. (1981). Art and young Americans, 1974-1979: Results from the Second National Art Assessment, Report No. 10-A-01. Denver, CO: National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Art Education/Novemberl988 13



discipline-based art education: its criticisms and its critics

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